Mobile Health App Ratings by Kaiser

I recently had the chance to sit down with Kaiser’s mobile group at the Health 2.0 conference in Boston. We had a really interesting discussion where I was able to learn a number of interesting things about Kaiser’s approach to mobile healthcare. As everyone knows they have a really unique environment with a number of incredible opportunities, but also with their own unique challenges. I’ll be discussing a number of these items in future posts.

Although one opportunity came to my mind in my discussion with Kaiser: A Mobile Health App Rating service by Kaiser.

Many people might remember my previous post about the atrocious idea of an mHealth App Certification. I think this is a really terrible idea and will do nothing to help physicians and patients be able to weed through the overwhelming number of mobile health apps.

With that side comment, I love the idea of Kaiser using its vast network of doctors and patients to rate various mobile health apps. Sure, there are some issues with this model as well, but the benefits of having so many valid doctors rate mobile health apps could be tremendous.

The challenge with most rating services is that you have no way of knowing if the person rating the service is actually who they say they are. For example, Sermo is supposedly a physician only forum. However, I know a lot of non-physicians that are on the forum. One advantage Kaiser has is that they could know if the person in their network is a Kaiser physician or not.

One key question is whether Kaiser would be open to making their physician mobile health app ratings available to the public. I’m sure this will be a tricky question for them to answer. No doubt they already kind of do some of this already in their internal network. Maybe it’s not totally codified into a website with a formal process, but it could be. Plus, the benefits to healthcare in general could be great.

What do you think of Kaiser physicians rating mobile health apps? Are there other better ways to filter through the volume of mobile health apps that exist out there?

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

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